


Captive Star

by 13slipperyeels



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Captivity, Isolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-05 22:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17927465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13slipperyeels/pseuds/13slipperyeels
Summary: Long enough in solitary confinement will drive a human to the far reaches of madness, but Startouch elves experience time in a completely different way. Or, sometimes you go so far around the bend you come back the other way.





	Captive Star

Aaravos had thought he was used living alone in the vast darkness of space, far outside the orbit of Xadia. Space isn't empty, it lies instead sprawling carelessly like a desert full of it's own kind of uncanny life. Life that can be found if your are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough. Everything is much farther apart there and while Startouch elves meet rarely they _do_ meet. They can age, they can die. He had thought this prison bearable.

It had been, at first. The elf able to mull over memories of a long long life, memories of countless births and deaths. Of battles and bonds and betrayal, reconciliations. Interactions lost to the short memory of mortal creatures. Humans had a mere century of life if they were lucky and though elves held longer to survival they too, eventually passed. Eventually forgot. Knowledge falling through their cupped hands like a child trying to grasp a stream of water. There is so much that only he remembers. 

He had taken a few centuries to sleep here and there before falling into a deep hibernation. This too was expected. 

But when he woke.

When he woke nothing had changed and no one was there. Time had literally not passed. Here in this fold of the world between life and death time had simply not occurred. He's experienced these folds before where two places lain close together and sometimes you put your foot through one and into another like going down a step you don't expect. It's not particularly unnatural, just another part of the way things are. Before, he could always come and go as he pleased. Here he is trapped. There are other things in those worlds too, sometimes people and sometimes not but there is always something, someone, somewhere. 

Here he is more alone than he has literally ever been, the isolation deeper than he has ever experienced. There is no presence to be sensed, there is no time, he is imprisoned in a place of total stillness and he... is afraid. The lack of change paralyzes his slow sense of time and it stagnates inside of him with nowhere to go. A flowing river will remain clean but water trapped in a jar becomes poison. Aaravos imagines he can feel it in his body and mind, the stagnation, the rot. His awareness of this drives him to destruction of his surroundings and of himself, loosing his considerable magic to crash against the metaphorical bars of his prison, knowing that it will not work. There is not the remotest chance of it making any difference. Still, he burns himself out again and again, drives himself beyond frenzy. He has to do it. He has to. 

His own power feels like a hot writhing thing deep down inside. Something squirming seething trapped in his body that sets his teeth on edge. He has no knowledge of how much time has passed outside this place. He has no desire to live, he lives because he has to. He lives because there is nothing else he can do. Aaravos would suffer any punishment would he only be free for at least then there would be change. There would be something where now there is nothing. Even just the movement of air to give him a fragmentary glimpse of the flow of time. A puff of breath. A sound. Anything. How long will they leave him there? Has he been forgotten here in a world of nothing? If he is ever found... will it be too late? His memories! His knowledge! 

The excruciating pain of nothing. 

Imprisoned inside the sheer lack of everything he goes mad. But this is a deathless place and even that passes. Slowly, the ancient elf comes back to himself. In pieces, scraps and fragments of memory painstakingly written into books for him to go back and pore over. To remember his long, long life. It takes even more effort to rebuild the structures that had been here before and this also he does by memory as he has nothing else. Something unrelenting and cold has replaced the sense of rot in him, something vicious in it's demand for life. Aaravos creates routines of meaningless action to keep himself occupied with the bleak understanding that he can and will wait. He will endure the shuddering terror of being abandoned here and will wait without hope. 

He will wait because there is nothing else he can do. 

But he will plan. 


End file.
